'Wonka' Review: Willy When He Was Young and Oh So Sweet

Timothee Chalamet stars as the chocolatier in this musical origin story, playing a wide-eyed innocent instead of an eccentric mad-hatter.

By Manohla Dargis
Dec. 14, 2023

Younger, sweeter and significantly less weird than his prior screen incarnations, the latest Willy Wonka - played by Timothee Chalamet - sets off on his adventure with a dream and a smile. For the next two hours, he keeps smiling, while sometimes singing, kind of dancing and concocting idiosyncratic treats like chocolates salted with, as Willy explains, "the bittersweet tears of a Russian clown." Called hoverchocs, this particular delectable sends its nibblers flying. Alas, they weren't given out at the press screening so I remained earthbound.

Movie franchises live forever, it seems, hence "Wonka," a new musical origin story set in an earnest key about the first business ventures of the young Willy. It's a bright, light movie - in palette and temperament - that's stuffed with talented performers who seem to be having a pleasant time, even when pretending to be meanies. Its most distinctive quality is that it's nice, with scarcely a hint of the misanthropy that burbles through Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the 1964 best seller that generated adaptations in assorted media, including two earlier films and a Broadway musical. (This movie has different music.)

Dahl's novel and its two film adaptations feature an impoverished boy, Charlie, "a good sensible loving child" who pays a life-changing visit to a chocolate factory owned by the mysterious Willy Wonka. Directed by Paul King, "Wonka" turns back the clock to when Willy was a striver with near-empty pockets and a suitcase filled with enchantments. After years of sailing the world, he pursues his toothsome dreams in a Euro-ville pastiche, with a vaulted shopping arcade and a plaza large enough to hold big musical numbers. He soon encounters hurdles in the form of a cartel and a hotelier, Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman), who - in a plotline that mirrors one in the novel - hoodwinks guests into servitude.

"Wonka" has songs, old and new (the most memorable are from Mel Stuart's 1971 film), dance numbers, a river of chocolate and no surprises. Among its least surprising attractions is Chalamet, an anodyne dreamboat who delivers an enthusiastic performance with a reedy tenor and awkward kicks, his floppy hair shimmying under Willy's top hat. As the title suggests, Willy is decidedly the star: He enters perched atop a ship's mast, an elevated position that he retains throughout. And while he soon has a child sidekick, a regulation charmer called Noodle (Calah Lane), the youngest of Mrs. Scrubbit's indentured minions, it is Willy who now effectively has the role of the wide-eyed innocent once played by Charlie.

Willy's affability makes this iteration of the character less like Dahl's eccentric mad-hatter and more spiritually akin to the gentle ursine protagonist in King's live-action movies "Paddington" and "Paddington 2." Like that Paddington the bear, this Willy the candymaker soon finds a supportive community in his digitally enhanced new digs as well as maternal warmth from Sally Hawkins, a scene-stealing foil in Hugh Grant (here as an Oompa-Loompa) and various whimsical escapades that suggest King is as much a fan of Rube Goldberg machines as of storybook confections. The movie is overly busy, as these kinds of eager-to-please diversions tend to be, and at two hours it overstays its welcome.

Written by King and Simon Farnaby, "Wonka" could use more tart notes; at times it's borderline saccharine. That isn't surprising given how King has reconceptualized Wonka's personality (there's no shiver of menace here) and given too the Disney-fication of children's entertainment. In the years since the book first hit, Wonka World has changed, notably in the conception of the Oompa-Loompas, the factory's diminutive workers. Dahl originally made them African Pygmies who Wonka smuggled, but, per one biographer, after the N.A.A.C.P. complained, he ditched their origin story and made them "rosy white." The 1971 film with Gene Wilder, in turn, gave them orange skin and green hair, a makeover that Tim Burton ditched for his 2005 movie starring Johnny Depp and that King has restored.

One of the trickier problems that Dahl presents for contemporary filmmakers is finding a way to tap into the pleasures of his work without reproducing its ugliness. The movie skirts some of this simply because it predates Willy's fame, and maybe by the time the presumptive sequel arrives, the Oompa-Loompas will have formed a trade union. By then, I hope that Dahl's contempt for fat characters, which the movie echoes in some unfunny business with a gluttonous police chief (Keegan-Michael Key), will also be a thing of the past.

Those bits are seriously unfortunate in a movie that otherwise embraces niceness with unforced sincerity as it invites you to let your imagination run loose, never more amusingly than with the idea that one day Timothee Chalamet will turn into Depp or, if we're lucky, Gene Wilder.



Willy Wonka showing off his dancing and singing skills, infront of the Galerie Gourmet, imagining what it would be like to own a Chocolate Shop within this prestigious area.


Wonka's dancing comes to an end as a police officer stops him. It seems daydreaming within the Galerie Gourmet is prohibited as Wonka is met with a fine of 3 sovereigns.


Wonka meets the Chocolate Cartel named, Fickelgruber, Slugworth, and Prodnose respectively. Slugworth is the leader of this group and the wealthiest Chocolatier in all of the Galerie Gourmet and beyond.


Wonka stands atop a Tree made of Chocolate within his spectacular shop located in the Galerie Gourmet. It is the centerpiece of what can only be called the most incredible chocolate experience ever.


As the movie comes to a close, Wonka transforms an old castle into a wondorous Chocolate Factory, lined with all sorts of chocolate and candy making devices. It is this moment that signifies Wonka's transition into the Greatest Chocolatier the world has ever known.


Other Wonka Reviews -

AP News - Timothee Chalamet waltzes through the whimsical 'Wonka' but Roald Dahl's daring is missing

The original 1971 "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" may have been a delicious dream, lined with trees of gumballs and fields of lollipops. But never has there been a more cautionary tale about the danger of too much of a good thing.

Magical as that Roald Dahl-scripted film was, it remains lodged in our imaginations less for its sugary goodness than the way darkness, satire and even mania ebb around its edges - flowing down that nightmarish watery tunnel and pooling somewhere in the back of Gene Wilder's eyes. Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Joe may bubble with laughter all the way up the ceiling, but there's a spinning metal blade up there.

"Wonka," the latest attempt to revisit Dahl's masterwork, bears no such danger. It's going more for the taste of an Everlasting Gobstopper - an ingenious confection that piles flavor on top of flavor. Tasty though that can be, you miss the daring of Dahl in the more wanly whimsical "Wonka."

The Guardian - Timothee Chalamet's Chocolate Factory prequel is a superbly sweet treat

On paper, it is the worst possible idea: a new musical-prequel origin myth for Willy Wonka, the reclusive top-hatted chocolatier from Roald Dahl's 1964 children's story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who decides in the onset of middle age to offer five Golden Tickets at random for kids to look round his secret confectionery paradise, staffed by a slave labour workforce of Oompa-Loompas.

But in the hands of Brit-cinema's new kings of comedy, writer Simon Farnaby and writer-director Paul King (who have already worked their magic on Paddington), this pre-Wonka is an absolute Christmas treat; it's spectacular, imaginative, sweet-natured and funny.

LA Times - A winning Timothee Chalamet, less sly than sweet, turns 'Wonka' into his own playground

"Wonka," the new musical origin story of everyone's favorite chocolatier, is a lot like the confections our protagonist conjures: We don't need chocolate, but how can we resist such a tantalizing treat? We don't need a musical origin story of Willy Wonka, but how can we not chomp down on this whimsical and wonderful tale, crafted by "Paddington" and "Paddington 2" auteur Paul King and starring Timothee Chalamet? Don't even try to say no. Just enjoy the indulgence.

Working with "Paddington 2" screenwriter Simon Farnaby, King puts his own stamp on the lore of Wonka, much in the same way that Tim Burton applied his sensibility to "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" in 2005 with Johnny Depp. That performance was a departure from the representation of Willy Wonka with which we are most familiar: Gene Wilder in the 1971 version, directed by Mel Stuart, adapted from the beloved Roald Dahl novel. And Chalamet delivers his own take here as well.

Chalamet's Wonka is innocent and deeply earnest. He is mischievous, like Depp's and Wilder's depictions, but while Depp was quirky and fey, and Wilder was sly and sarcastic, Chalamet' doesn't have an ounce of guile. His guard isn't up yet when he lands in an unnamed European city, which is seemingly equal parts London, Paris and Geneva, or maybe Brussels.

NPR - 'Wonka' returns with more music, less menace

Before there was Elf on a Shelf, looking down on children to punish the bad and reward the good, there was Willy Wonka. In the novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and in the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Wonka brings five children on a tour of his candy factory. Four of them are deemed bad (one is spoiled, one watches too much television, one is fat, one ... chews gum?) and find themselves ejected from the factory in humiliating ways. Only the good boy, Charlie, remains to collect his reward.

Roald Dahl, who wrote both the novel and the screenplay of the 1971 film, makes this the kind of "if you're not good, giants will eat you; if you are good, you can have candy" story that has been used to scare kids straight for ages. In the new musical film Wonka, starring Timothee Chalamet as the iconic candyman, the ominous rumble behind the story is removed in favor of a colorful telling of how Willy Wonka, who came to the big city with nothing as a young man, struck it rich in the sweets business by dreaming his big dreams and defeating his enemies.

Rolling Stone - Timothee Chalamet Bites Off More Than He Can Chew

They were all young once: Don Corleone and Darth Vader, Butch and Sundance, Hannibal and Leatherface, Maleficent and Cruella. And long before he was the world's best-known chocolatier and distributor of life-changing golden tickets, William "Willy" Wonka was just a twentysomething kid with a top hat, a sweet tooth, and a dream.

For decades, we could only guess how the bright-eyed lad became the candymaker-in-chief. This is where Wonka comes in. A prequel that seeks to both fill in the blanks regarding Roald Dahl's eccentric sugar pimp and give this generation the Willy they deserve, this look back at the origin story of a kid's-movie icon is determined to win you over by wearing you down. We all know that every buzzy sugar rush is inevitably followed by a crash. This movie somehow makes you feel as if you're experiencing both the high and the low at the same time.

TIME - Wonka Is, Respectfully, a Little Too Much

People who love musicals often find themselves in a Sharks vs. Jets standoff with those who don't. I recall a highly intelligent but perhaps overly literal sixth-grade classmate defending his stance with a sniff: "People don't just spontaneously burst into song on the street." He was right, but also so, so wrong. Without musicals, the world would be much more miserable than it already is; they're one of the great joys of theater and film. But essential to loving them is also reserving the right to call out a desperate, overly calculated one when you see it. And the charm offensive that is Wonka toils way too hard for its meager pleasures. It may leave you feeling more worked over than invigorated.

Wonka-directed by Paul King, the animating force behind the truly marvelous Paddington films-is a prequel to the story first cooked up by Roald Dahl with his 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The book has already spawned its share of movie adaptations: There's Tim Burton's loopy but fascinating 2005 version, starring Johnny Depp, and Mel Stuart's 1971 picture with Gene Wilder, whose mildly malevolent performance, for me, represents the gold standard-or at least the gold-foil-wrapped standard-of Wonka representation. It's unfair to compare King's Wonka to either; it builds on those movies in a respectful way, though the universe King builds is really the movie's own, for better or perhaps worse.

Variety - Timothee Chalamet Makes a Winning Willy Wonka

Every fan of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (1971) loves the scene where Gene Wilder, as the mystical candy maker, takes his guests on a psychedelic tunnel ride, zooming through the bowels of the Chocolate Factory as he chants a little verse ("There's no earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going..."), getting angrier and more hysterical by the second. Wilder's Wonka was a sweetheart, but he had a hidden maniacal side. And in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," Tim Burton's majestically wacked 2005 remake, Johnny Depp, then at the apex of his movie stardom, went full Depp, playing Wonka like some louche vampiristic cross between Anna Wintour and Michael Jackson.

But in "Wonka," the fun, rousing, impeccably staged, jaw-droppingly old-fashioned musical prequel to the legendary Roald Dahl tale, Timothee Chalamet plays the title character as the beaming soul of effervescent goodness. His chocolate passion is there (he's all but defined by it), but the kinks are gone; so is any trace of a dark side. Willy, a young man of about 25, arrives in London after seven years of sailing around the globe, during which he was scouring obscure lands for the rare delicacies that will give his candy its transcendent tastiness. He's got his recipes for confections like the hoverchoc, an egg of chocolate with a bug inside that causes you to levitate, and he's got his look (long purple coat, vest, ascot, rumpled top hat). But most of all he's got his dream: to lift up the world by bringing the wonder of his candy to everyone in it.


Wonka Actors -

Timothee Chalamet Credits -